“I was attempting to determine the blood type of the dried sample on the floor.”
“Oh, how interesting,” I said. “Were you trying to apply Schiff’s work on serum—”
“I don’t believe this,” Billy growled. “Miss Russell, where the devil have you been?”
“Here, mostly. I thought I left a clear sign that I was well, and I figured that Holmes…but evidently not.”
“Start at the beginning!”
Billy had never spoken to me in that tone before. I glanced at Holmes, who was sitting remarkably close to my side. He nodded. I settled my coffee onto my knee, and started at the beginning.
“I was in my study on Wednesday morning when I heard a car in the drive. At first I thought it might be Mrs Hudson and Patrick returning for something, but when I looked out of the window…”
I told them about seeing the strange motor, it pulling close to the door because of the rain showers, and my introduction to the man who called himself Samuel Hudson. I took some time describing his almost-impudent manner: strutting through the sitting room as if I were an estate agent and he the prospective buyer.
“Anyway, he’d seemed surprised to see me, which suggested at least a possibility of criminal intent. Then I found myself reacting to him as if I knew he was a threat. Very odd. At any rate, all indications were that he was, if not her actual son, at least a close relative. I decided to see what information I could get out of him. So I offered him tea, and went to put on the kettle. When I came out, intending to ask if he preferred Sultana biscuits or lemon loaf, I found myself looking into the working end of a revolver.”
Holmes’ disapproval verged on outrage. “You did not notice he was armed?”
“He was wearing a large overcoat, and it must have been in the right-hand pocket of his jacket. I was to his left.”
“Yet despite your body’s reaction to this man, you returned to the sitting room unprepared?”
“Surely you know me better than that, Holmes? However, if I’d gone in with a drawn revolver of my own, he’d have started shooting and then I’d have had to join in—window glass everywhere, furniture ruined, the panelling full of holes. Mrs Hudson would have been very cross.” Billy’s mouth had dropped again, so I amended my frivolous tone. “Besides, I’d have got no answers from him. He hadn’t come just to shoot me, or I’d have been dead already. Presenting an apparently harmless face for a while longer might tell me what he wanted.”
Holmes grunted, and reached for his tobacco.
“I’ll confess it’s an uncomfortable sensation to have a gun aimed in one’s direction. But he did seem to be after something—some thing—and I didn’t think he was going to shoot me if he thought I was helping. When he asked me where Mrs Hudson kept her possessions, I took him to her rooms. He sat me in the chair and went through her desk, but didn’t find what he was after. Although he did take her passbook. And broke that saucer I had repaired for her last year, out of spite.
“I then suggested the storage under the stairs, so we went there and I took out the box of her sister’s whatnot. By the way, Holmes, we really have to figure a way to store a weapon in there without offending Mrs Hudson’s sensibilities.”
“You did have your knife?”
“Yes, but—anyway, I took the box into the sitting room and dumped it onto the table, but it wasn’t there, either. He was looking for something paper: a passbook, legal forms, a letter. He seemed to think he’d sent it accidentally from Australia last year, along with that other rubbish—it sounded as if he hadn’t known at the time what it was. But whatever he was looking for wasn’t in the box, and I couldn’t remember seeing anything like that in it when it arrived last winter.
“So: failure. Which left him with two choices: shoot me then, or hold his gun on me and use me as a means of pressuring Mrs Hudson when she arrived. He became overwrought, describing how horrible his mother had been to him. Maybe he wanted me to understand why he had to kill me. I had just decided to get the drop on him when he said something that stopped me cold.”
I fixed my gaze on Holmes. “You and I, we’ve never really talked about Mrs Hudson. Who she is, how she came to work for you. I know some of it, I’ve extrapolated more over the years”—(God forbid I should admit to guessing)—“but it’s clear that you do not want to discuss it. Now, I don’t mind that our housekeeper has a history, but I do think the time has come for you to explain it a bit more. Because the thing her son told me, waving that gun around in my face? He said he intended not just to ruin our lives, but to see Mrs Hudson hanged for murder.”
Holmes knew what I was talking about, I could see that. Worse, Billy knew as well.
“So, he wasn’t lying, then. Is her name actually Clarissa?”
“It used to be,” Holmes conceded.
I appeared to be the only one required to start at the beginning here. “Anyway, I could tell that he believed she was guilty of some major crime, and I could also tell that he was working himself up to shoot me. So I waited until he was distracted, then went for him. With my knife. Although, just as I did so, when it was too late to stop, he was saying something about how I would have to do.”
“His precise words?” Holmes demanded.
I’d had three days now to reconstruct Samuel Hudson’s final words. “He said, ‘I’ll have to take you back and see if you’ll do.’ ”
“ ‘Do’ for what?” Billy asked. “Back where?”
I could only shrug my ignorance. “Holmes, does that sound to you as if—”
“—he had a partner? Yes.”
“Perhaps even a superior: there’s a bit of the dog-bringing-home-a-bone air about the phrase—but that was all he got out before, well…”
“The knife.”
“Yes.”
“Your arm was cut, too.”
I pushed back my left sleeve, revealing the bandages over the shallow, jagged slice that Mycroft’s pet medico had stitched when I arrived; the arm hurt, but was healing. It would not be my first scar. “I had to put the knife up my sleeve when I was getting the box from the storage shelves. But I keep that blade extremely sharp, and what with carrying the box and keeping the tip of it away from the fabric so it wouldn’t fall to the floor—well, flesh is soft.”
Looking at their faces, I was glad the wound was concealed by a tidy bandage: even the doctor had been angry over how close I’d let the blade come to something vital.
As it was, Billy’s chief concern was a different matter. “You went after a gunman with nothing but a three-inch-long blade?”
“Nearly four. And he wasn’t expecting it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Also, Mrs Hudson had polished the floor.”
“He dropped the gun,” Holmes said, “and it went off.”
“Right. The bullet’s somewhere under the table.”
“In the bookshelf, actually. The gun also left a dent in the floor where it landed.”
“I imagine it did.”
“When did the lamp fall?”
“Oh, that was before. He recognised it as belonging to Mrs Hudson, and tossed it in the bin.”
“And some pages of Dombey and Son fell out.”
“He flipped through it. Whatever he was after wasn’t there.”
“Well, that clarifies some of the more distracting details.”
“I tidied up the box of Mrs Hudson’s things a bit, and put them back under the stairs, but I was afraid to spend any more time cleaning. So I…left the rest.”
I stared into the fire, caught up in those terrible minutes: gazing down at the figure on the floor, turning away to the only task my mind could come up with, that of neatly packing away Mrs Hudson’s rifled possessions in the storage beneath the stairs. Taking my time with every page and piece of it, until the sounds had stopped.
I could feel the two men watching me. I knew there would be a frown of concentration between Holmes’ eyebrows. I knew precisely when the penny dropped in his mind.
His question was gentle. “How long did it take Samuel Hudson to die?”
My throat closed up. “I couldn’t…I had to…” Breathe. One deliberate breath: in, out. “I was afraid of what he might tell the police. About Mrs Hudson.”
“How long?”
“Not long, really. It just felt like forever. He…His noises were…” Outside, London was waking, the day getting under way, but in that sitting room, the only sound was the settle of the dying fire. “Mycroft’s doctor agreed, that even if I’d left the knife in place, he’d have died before reaching a hospital.”
I felt Holmes’ hand on my shoulder, his voice in my ear. “This was self-defence.”
“It felt like murder.”
Billy chimed in. “It was not.”
But it was. “In any event, I took my time putting away Mrs Hudson’s box, then went upstairs to wrap some gauze around my arm. By the time I came back down, he had…stopped. Of course, he’d bled all over, stupid of me not to think of that. And as I said, I was going to clean it up but I looked at the clock and I thought, Which is worse: leaving blood for Mrs Hudson, or having her come in and find her son?
“So, I took one of the old blankets and dragged him out to the car. Managed to fold him inside the boot. And I was about to drive away when it occurred to me—God, why does the brain just stop functioning in times of stress? It occurred to me that I should leave a message, so you would have some idea what happened. I couldn’t very well leave a note saying, ‘Gone to London with…’ ” With the corpse of Mrs Hudson’s son. “For one thing, I couldn’t imagine her keeping the police out of it. And for another, there was that statement he’d made about me ‘having to do.’ If I was his second-best target, it suggested either you or Mrs Hudson was the person he was after. So I left messages that you would read but no one else would notice. I just didn’t imagine it would take you three days to read them. What happened?”
“A series of well-meaning unintended consequences, beginning with a constable’s scrub-brush on the footprints—”
I winced.
“—and continuing when Mrs Hudson permitted Lestrade to take the knife down and away—”
“Good Lord.”
“—then coming to a climax with the unfortunate coincidence that Samuel Hudson and Mary Russell share a blood type.”
At that, I uttered an Anglo-Saxon phrase.
“Quite,” he agreed. “Of course, once I saw the police photographs, I was set on the right track at last, but those only came into my hand a few hours ago.”
Billy, who had been following this with growing agitation, broke in. “I don’t see where these messages of yours lie. The footprints, sure—those might have shown that Miss Russell’s shoes were doing the clearing up, but the knife?”
Sherlock Holmes with a look of disappointment on his face is a terrible thing. “Mr Mudd, if some ten percent of the population have type B blood, and some ten percent of the population are left-handed, what are the chances Russell’s attacker shared both characteristics with her?”
“Like I said earlier—”
“The dent in the floor told us that he was not left-handed.”
“Why?”
Holmes lifted an eyebrow at the poor man. “You saw the dent, beneath the table.”
“Yeah. So?”
“And the blood?”
“Next to the table, yes.”
“Its shape indicates he was lying on his…”
“Back. The blood ran down both sides of his chest. One side was smeared when he was rolled into the blanket.”
“If the gun had been in his left hand, and it fell at the same time he did, to land beneath the table would require that he was standing…where? Given that he was not three feet tall?”
Frowning, Billy tried to re-create the place. Blood there. Gun there. Person standing…
Holmes saw comprehension dawn, and nodded. “He’d have been standing in the bookshelf, yes. Simple geometry. But it wasn’t until I saw the photograph that I could be sure of the sequence. That someone left-handed had driven the knife into the wall—had first wiped off the knife, then scraped it through the blood, and driven it into the wall—could only be a message. Hence, the blood was not Russell’s.”
Billy was not entirely satisfied, but then, he seldom was when it came to the explanations of Sherlock Holmes. “I’m not sure you can keep all this from Mrs Hudson,” he said. “Sooner or later, she’ll have to know her son tried to kill you, or maybe her.”
“Why?” Holmes asked.
“You can’t honestly intend to—”
I did not think this was the time for that particular discussion: I interrupted. “Until we know exactly what was going on, I’m not sure we can make that decision. I just didn’t want her coming back from market and…oh, damn. The strawberries. Today was supposed to be…”
“The party,” Holmes said. “She has made the necessary telephone calls. She merely told your friends some important case had come up.”
Crates of rotting strawberries, on top of everything else, I thought sadly.
Billy pushed us ruthlessly back on track. “You should at least have left her a note. So she knew you’d not been kidnapped. Or killed outright.”
“I did leave a message—tried to—just not for her. I didn’t think a note would be safe. Samuel’s partner—or employer, whichever it is—could be anyone. He could break in and see the note, he could hear about it from the police, it could even end up in the newspapers. If there was a message that Holmes alone could read, it was secure. At the cost of some hours of grief for her, yes, but I could see no way around that.”
“Why would it matter if everyone knew you were safe? You’d killed a man with a gun, in your own house. No one would call that wrong.”
“Her son,” I said. “Who had some terrible secret about her. Which he might have told a partner.”
I let him think about that for a moment—Billy, who loved Mrs Hudson as much as I did. “If his partner knew that Samuel had failed, we were all vulnerable. But if Samuel just vanished, along with me, it would at least confuse matters for a few days. Long enough that we could set a trap for a second attempt at the passbook or letter or what-have-you.
“Which we could have done,” Holmes remarked, “were it not for the helpfulness of the police.”
“I didn’t even know if Samuel had come alone, or if there were companions watching the place. I knew they wouldn’t be able to see his motorcar, where he’d left it—not without me being able to see them. I thought that if I motored off with him, it would at least get him off the premises and away from Mrs Hudson, so we could decide what to do with him. But I also thought that if he did have companions in the area, and they spotted his car driving away, they might follow.”
The two men raised identical eyebrows.
“I was armed, remember. With his gun. And I thought I could lead them for some distance before I tried to lose them. By that time, Mrs Hudson would have got home. I knew the first thing she would do would be to telephone the police. They and Patrick would stay with her until you arrived and deciphered my message.”
The best-laid plans.
“In fact,” Holmes said, “her first call was to Billy.”
“Really? Ah, to have him locate you—I saw the message in the agony column. My own message demanding that the Beekeeper be in touch with his brother will appear in today’s papers.”
“Why on earth didn’t you telephone me?” Billy asked.
“I did, twice. The first time you were out, the second time you had gone to Sussex, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave a message with your secretary. But if you all thought I was dead, shouldn’t one of you have ’phoned here? God knows Mycroft wanted me to ’phone you.” I’d never have managed to keep my brother-in-law from interfering if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the Honours list.
“Had you gone missing in Paris or Macau, yes,” Holmes said—and it was true, Mycroft’s sources of information were stronges
t when it came to international affairs. “But Mycroft has been looking a bit…stretched. I thought that adding a burden about which he could do nothing would benefit no one. At any rate, it was only a few hours later that Billy provided me with a file on Samuel Hudson. I did not feel that Mycroft could improve on it.”
I had not been talking about using Mycroft, but about telling him—still, I let it go for the time.
Billy started to ask another question. “So where’s—”
But Holmes spoke over him. “Speaking of Mrs Hudson, I did promise to let her know you were safe. Billy, if you don’t get home to your wife, she’ll never permit you to come to Sussex again. I’ll ring you later in the day when Russell and I have made our decisions.”
Billy did not care for being dismissed. I could see him consider a protest, but as he watched Holmes go to the telephone and begin the business of putting a call through to Sussex, he subsided—not happily, but with a lifetime of experience.
Still: he turned to me. “She’s spent three very frightened days.”
“I imagine. I’m sorry.”
“Tell her that.”
“I will.”
He cast a dark glance at Holmes, who was patiently arguing with the exchange, and picked up his hat.
I half expected Holmes to ring off the instant Billy left. Instead, he let the call go through, and said quite clearly, “Mrs Hudson, I shall be staying in London for some days, with friends. Yes, friends. I do have them, you know. No, I don’t know when I’ll be back. Give my greetings to Lestrade.” Abruptly, he returned the earpiece to its stand.
I was surprised. “That was an odd sort of conversation, even from you.”
“A tapping of the telephone line, Russell. The police hope for a ransom demand. Mrs Hudson and I agreed on the code word ‘friends.’ ”
Holmes had code words with Mrs Hudson? Well, at least that made for one tiny concern off my mind: Mrs Hudson could rest easy now.
Holmes placed his hands lightly on my shoulders. “It was not murder, you know.”
He felt my shudder. “Yes, it was.”
The Murder of Mary Russell Page 25